Pirates of Somalia (2 page)

* * *

Just a few months earlier, I had been a recent university graduate, killing the days writing tedious reports for a market research firm in Chicago, and trying to break into journalism with the occasional cold pitch to an unresponsive editor. I had no interest in journalism school, which I thought of as a waste of two of the best years of my life—years that I should spend in the fray, learning how to do my would-be job in places where no one else would go.

Somalia was a good candidate, jockeying with Iraq and Afghanistan for the title of the most dangerous country in the world. The country had commanded a soft spot in my heart since my PoliSci days, when I had wistfully dreamt of bringing the astounding democratic success of the tiny self-declared Republic of Somaliland (Puntland’s western neighbour) to the world’s attention.

The headline-grabbing hijacking of the tank transport MV
Faina
in September 2008 presented me with a more realistic opportunity. I sent out some feelers to a few Somali news services, and within ten minutes had received an enthusiastic response from Radio Garowe, the lone news outlet in Puntland’s capital city. After a few long emails and a few short phone calls with Radio Garowe’s founder, Mohamad Farole, I decided to buy a ticket to Somalia.

It took multiple tickets, as it turned out. Getting to Somalia was an aerophobe’s nightmare—a forty-five-hour voyage that took me through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso, and finally Galkayo. In Dubai, I joined the crowd of diaspora Somalis, most making short visits to see their families, pushing cart upon cart overflowing with goods from the outside world. Curious eyes began to glance my way, scanning, no doubt, for signs of mental instability. I was in no position to help them make the diagnosis; by the first leg of my trip, I had already lost the ability to judge objectively whether what I was doing was sane or not. News reports of the numerous journalists kidnapped in Puntland fixated my imagination. I channelled the hours of nervous energy into studying the lone Somali language book I had been able to dig up at the public library; I scribbled answers to exercises into my notebook with an odd sense of urgency, as if cramming for an exam that would take place as soon as I set foot in Somalia.

The last white face disappeared at Djibouti’s dilapidated, near-deserted airport, as American F-16s performed eardrum-shattering training manoeuvres overhead. By the time the plane landed in Galkayo, I was the only non-Somali passenger on board.

* * *

The Antonov’s first stop was Bossaso, Puntland’s northernmost port and most populous city. We wove back and forth over water and land, as Somalia’s undulating coastline cut back and forth across the vector of our flight. Out of the scratched porthole, the solid azure of the Gulf of Aden below was broken only by intermittent white cracks marking the location of swells; from the sky, they looked like fissures erupting on the surface of a perfectly smooth blue rock face. As the plane swung back towards the coast, the lines of white increased in number, joined by the occasional fishing trawler cutting its own independent trail across the water.

As we crossed over land, Bossaso came into view. It was the first sign of life Somalia had displayed, a settlement rising out of the vast, lunar wasteland enveloping it. From the air, the city appeared as a clutter of corrugated roof buildings, gathering in a concentrated burst before spilling into the sea. The minarets of occasional mosques poked out of the conglomeration of one- and two-storey structures. A miniature range of denuded mountains, looking like cropped volcanoes, formed a crescent around the city.

The plane banked precipitously and began its descent towards the thin stretch of unclaimed beach lying between city and ocean, in which Bossaso airstrip was nestled. The temperature in the cabin began to rise once more as the Antonov left the higher altitudes. Within a few minutes, the plane had come to a bumping stop on the sand-coated runway.

The thought hit me for the first time:
I am in fucking Somalia
.

Somalia is like a country out of a twisted fairy tale, an ethereal land given substance only by the stories we are told of it. Everything known by the outside world has been constructed from news reports spilling out of the country over the last twenty years: warlords, famine, Black Hawks, jihadis, and now pirates. Along with bananas and livestock, international news is one of the few items that Somalia can still claim to export, and crossing the border from Djibouti into Somalia had brought me from the world of news consumers into the world of news producers.

The stopover was brief; as soon as the Antonov had finished refuelling, the remaining passengers climbed back on board and it took off once more, setting a course for Galkayo, a city straddling Puntland’s southern border. The desert below stretched in shades of brown and blond; evaporated riverbeds scarred the pockmarked terrain, carving valleys in their wake. Galkayo is a dangerous place, a crucible where the northern Darod and the southern Hawiye clan families meet, cleaving the city along its east–west axis; the reputed English translation of the city’s name, “where the white man runs away,” did not put me at ease. Though I had initially assumed that the site marked a decisive victory by Somali independence fighters over British or Italian colonial forces, I later discovered that Galkayo was the location of a much earlier battle between invading Somalis and the non-Muslim indigenous inhabitants.

After another ninety minutes and seven hundred kilometres, Galkayo appeared. We touched down on another dusty landing strip, tires churning to a stop near an expectant crowd. It was the end of the line. I stepped once more down the six shaky steps onto Somali soil, and looked anxiously through the milling throng.

My own name had never sounded as sweet as when I heard it being called from across the landing strip. The voice belonged to Mohamad’s cousin Abdirizak, who waved and walked hurriedly towards me. He was short and trim, with a joyous laugh, warm smile, and a receding hairline. Hours of pent-up stress drained out of my body.

Abdi and I proceeded to a customs office, a largely empty building containing a few uniformed officials milling around behind bare wood and glass partitions. One of the bored agents looked me over and demanded twenty dollars for an “airport tax” and another twenty dollars for a visa, which he impressed onto my passport with a stamp that looked to be left over from the days of the collapsed Somali Republic.
¹
Asking how long I wished to remain in the country, he scribbled my answer into the allotted field on the still-drying stamp—apparently the twenty-dollar visa was a flat rate.

Abdi led me to a gleaming white-and-chrome Land Cruiser. Perched at either end of the back seat were two UN-trained bodyguards, Said and Abdirashid, who would accompany me like another heartbeat for the next six weeks. They cradled their worn AK-47s between the pant legs of their beige uniforms; crudely sewn on their sleeves were patches with the letters “SPU”—Special Police Unit—superimposed on a blue stag’s head, the emblem of the Puntland police.

In Somalia, 4×4s are needed to get around even in urban areas; with the exception of the main thoroughfare, Galkayo’s unpaved streets were worn down to their bare bones, the dirt eaten away by tire treads to the uneven rock beneath. The surfaces of the buildings, some whitewashed, some matching the dull brown of the road, were chipped and worn, and occasionally bullet-marked. The more upscale houses were covered with geometric patterns of vibrant blues, greens, and yellows, like the colours of a Van Gogh canvas. Similarly vivid paintings on the facades of shops—bags of flour, cans of oil, generic bottles of pills—advertised what was sold within. The Land Cruiser rocked to a stop in front of one of these; the listing English letters above the entrance read “General Store,” and one of the SPU guards dashed inside and returned with some cream-filled biscuits and a number of bottles of water. In the mid-afternoon heat, the streets were largely deserted except for a few children, who skipped around me cautiously.

The one-lane highway connecting Galkayo to Garowe and Bossaso is the sole road running through Puntland along its north–south axis, a solitary link stretching across seven hundred kilometres of desert. Its decrepit state was symbolic of the neglect the region experienced under former dictator Siad Barre, and from the international community more recently. The three-decade-old Chinese concrete was crumbling and corroded, and craterous potholes turned the 250-kilometre journey from Galkayo to Garowe into a four- or five-hour jolting ordeal. It was January 2009, the onset of the first of Puntland’s two dry seasons, the
jiilaal
, and parched shrubs dotted the barren landscape; the dust clung to my skin until my shirt felt like fine sandpaper. Piles of bottles, old tires, and the odd stripped chassis lined both sides of the road; discarded plastic bags, struggling in the clutches of spiny bushes, waved at us spasmodically as we drove by. Every so often an impassive camel plodded across the road, slowing us to a near halt.

At irregular intervals, buildings of thatched branches and the occasional panel of corrugated metal clustered into settlements by the side of the highway. The boundaries of these shantytowns were marked by speed bumps built by the inhabitants out of packed dirt and rocks. A few empty gasoline drums blocked the road at the entrance to each village, with two or three listless guards loitering around the makeshift checkpoints.

At one of these pit stops we abruptly turned off the road and pulled into an open-air restaurant, its plastic tables and chairs almost spilling onto the highway. A few words were exchanged, and out came metal plates heaped with sticky rice sopped in goat’s milk, flanked by fist-sized chunks of gristly camel meat. My two guards, sharing one of the plates, used their hands to squish the rice into pasty balls, which they proceeded to deposit into their mouths. I decided to use the spoon that had been offered to me, feeling somehow like an elitist in doing so. They looked attentively at me and smiled, waiting for my reaction to tasting camel meat for the first time. I picked at the stringy meat with a knife and my teeth as best I could, smiling back vacuously.

As we ate, a menacing semicircle of youth gradually formed around me, glowering eyes filled with mistrust and suspicion. I tried to lean as casually as possible against the back of my plastic lawn chair, but I was grateful for the SPU.

Four hours down the road, darkness fell. Close to the equator, night arrives startlingly quickly, with dusk relegated to the role of minor broker between night and day. The straight track ahead dissolved into the night beyond the reach of our high beams. No other cars were on the road, and the blackness around us was absolute. We climbed over the last in a series of gentle hills, and the muffled lights of Garowe finally came into view.

Soon we passed a checkpoint where a few yawning soldiers in fatigues hurriedly waved us through, then an abandoned gas station, the UN compound, and many other buildings I was unable to make out. Under the city’s muted street lights, Garowe was reduced to a monochromatic grey. Partway through the city we pulled off the main road and struck out onto Garowe’s pitch-black streets. Our headlights began to reveal haphazard piles of stone littered around spacious plots of empty land, evidence of Garowe’s ongoing building boom. We hit another, miniature, checkpoint, nothing more than a log laid across the path, where a uniformed soldier shouted at us to extinguish our headlights, glanced inside the car, and waved us through.

More soldiers were lounging around the entrance to Mohamad’s house. Our driver honked, causing a handful of them to jump to attention and rush to swing open the spiked iron gate. It was past nine o’clock, but multiple Land Cruisers were parked in the driveway and the courtyard was still bustling with activity. Until the last few days, the newly elected president of Puntland had lived here, before moving into the official residence inside the government compound.

I was sleepily ushered through the house and into its only functioning office, where Mohamad sat behind a desk covered by stacks of paper and a laptop. His frame, short and stocky, was the antithesis of the lanky and imperious figure that typified most Somalis. In the pale-green hue cast by the room’s only light source, I could not make out the details of his face, not that it made a difference; I had never so much as seen a photograph of the man who was to protect me for the next month and a half. We shook hands and exchanged quick pleasantries.

Soon Abdi and I were back in the dark meandering city corridors, twisting down nameless streets where I saw nothing and remembered nothing, and pulled to a stop in front of a modest-sized residence with a blue gate. We passed through a courtyard and past a set of swinging metal doors into the house. As the SPU set up camp in the courtyard, Abdi showed me down a hall to my room. I tossed down the sports bag carrying my computer, notebooks, and malaria medication next to the bed.

I had scarcely pulled the mosquito netting over the bed before I was asleep.

* * *

I was to spend the next six weeks living in Garowe, a rapidly expanding city at the very heart of the pirates’ tribal homeland. My local partner, Mohamad, was the son of the newly elected president, Abdirahman Farole, a fact that made me privy to backroom political dealings, stories, gossip, and daily impressions of life that went beyond the perceptions of reporters flying in to take snapshots of the gang behind the latest tanker hijacking. During this first trip to Puntland, I was shocked to encounter no other foreigners until my final day in the country, when, long-bearded and bedraggled, I briefly met with an Australian television crew hours before flying out of Bossaso. For an outsider, my access to the region was truly unique.

Contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country in anarchy. Indeed, to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity is a mischaracterization, because in the wake of the civil war the country has broken down into a number of autonomous enclaves. Founded in 1998 as a tribal sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of Darod clanspeople fleeing massacres in the south, Puntland State of Somalia comprises approximately 1.3 million people, one-quarter to one-third of Somalia’s total land mass (depending on whom you talk to), and almost half of its coastline. Straddling the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it was the natural candidate to become the epicentre of the recent outbreak of Somali piracy.